dystopic

This short video work was filmed in New York in 2000 and involves a plastic owl reading Bill Joy's text Why the future doesn’t need us, published in Wired magazine in 2000. The text outlines a dystopian future where humans a rendered obsolete and are replaced by the sentient beings they created. The plastic owl hose sole purpose is to scare pigeons from the rooftop of the house in the west village spins whilst the words are whispered and the pigeons continue to go about their business paying no regard to it.

An interactive animation (depicting a map of islands and a stretch of the sea) is screened on top of a model of an archipelago. The numbers on the map that signifies the waters' depth are clickable, for each number a short poetic text emerges. When clicking one of the islands, the screening goes dark and the selected island is lit with a green light. A longer text-animation is played. The texts are like notes from a distant future, with elements of slow violence, something lurking beneath the surface. The spectator chooses beginning and endpoint in the viewing - depending on how much time you give the piece the underlying storyline becomes clearer. It is nearly impossible to experience the work identically two times, to follow the same sequence of numbers.

This is the first HTML adaptation of a short story first published on ten loose sheets of paper in the so-called "envelope novel" Sesam 71  which Bringsværd published with Jon Bing in 1971. The story is told in the form of a cross-referenced dictionary giving definitions of words that describe a dystopic future world where over-population has become so extreme that each story of a house is built so that the ceiling can be lowered as there is need for more room. The title plays upon this, and in translation means something like, "Damn. They just lowered the ceiling height again. Must remember to buy new knee protectors." This is the example given to explain usage of the word "faen" in the dictionary. 

The publication year of 1996 is approximate. A second version was made in 1999 by Marius Watz, and this simple HTML version definitely predates Watz' version.

The original "envelope novel" that the 1971 paper version was part of is part of the Norwegian National Library's digitised collection, and is openly accessible to readers with Norwegian IP addresses.

Online work, in two parts + intro. Main themes: science fiction, nature. First published in 2006 by danish website Afsnit P. In the intro two books are slowly rotating, when clicking on them they each lead to one of the main parts of the piece: The Path of the Fragment and The Prime Directive. The images and texts in these are of a dark sci-fi nature, the soundtrack ambient and droney.